Although the origins of the Internet trace back to the late 1960s, the more recently-developed Worldwide Web (“Web”), together with the long-established Usenet, have revolutionized accessibility to untold volumes of information in stored electronic form to a worldwide audience, including written, spoken (audio) and visual (imagery and video) information, both in archived and real-time formats. The Web provides information via interconnected Web pages that can be navigated through embedded hyperlinks. The Usenet provides information in a non-interactive bulletin board format including static news messages posted and retrievable by readers. In short, the Web and Usenet provide desktop access to a virtually unlimited library of information in almost every language.
The Web provides an attractive advertising opportunity to product and service providers for inexpensively reaching a potentially large audience. On-line advertising can be targeted over the Web by tying Web-based advertisements to existing Web content, such as provided by on-line news and information providers. On-line advertising can also be targeted by tying Web-based advertisements to results generated by search engines in response to a user query.
Providing effective targeting is a key to successful on-line advertising. Where Web-based advertisements are provided as an adjunct to existing Web content, targeting seeks to take advantage of potential sales opportunities. Where Web-based advertisements are provided directly as search results, targeting seeks to identify the most relevant types of products and services, rather than merely providing topical Web content. Nevertheless, finding the most relevant advertisements can be difficult, particularly where the on-line advertiser has a large body of advertisements poorly grouped into generic categories of items.
One approach to targeting on-line advertisements adopts keyword searching techniques as commonly found in conventional search engines. An index of keywords is built for the search engine. Advertisers are then expected to tie into the keyword index by associating keywords with each product or service offered. Forming a keyword list for each product or service offered can be especially onerous for the advertisers with large sets of potential offerings which change frequently. Moreover, the ability to provide effective targeting becomes dependent on whether the search engine can interpret and broaden keywords found in user queries sufficiently to identify relevant advertisements. At best, advertisers can guess at new keywords in the hopes that better keywords will lead to more hits. Finally, relying on purely keyword-based targeting can unhelpfully generate results containing duplicative or comparable products or services.
From a content provider's standpoint, effective targeting can lead to increased advertising revenue. However, the space available for on-line advertisements on any given Web page is limited and, as a result, an increasing number of content providers have begun to offer Web-based advertisements presented in a standardized format, similar to conventional newspaper classified advertisements, and independent of advertising source. One common advertisement format uses a product name and informational body containing an extended product name, description, category name, merchant information, or other content. These standardized formats can increase the number of advertisements appearing on a Web page and consequently advertising revenue, but potential revenue is lost when non-responsive or unrelated advertisements appear, particularly where advertising revenue is derived from variable costs, such as charged for the space occupied by each advertisement and for the number of times an advertisement is displayed and selected by end users.
Therefore, there is a need for an approach to targeting Web-based advertisements to users based on an evaluation of queries using substantially the full context of the description of the products and services. Preferably, such an approach would score each potential advertisement based on the quality of the degree of match to the query and factor in the fixed and variable costs to enhance advertising revenue.
There is a further need for an approach to targeting and generating advertising creatives for identified relevant advertising using advertisements identified relative to the characteristics and information associated with each product and service offered.